its workings. If any politician were to start looking at the throne restored with envious eyes, the existence of the Court would give them pause to think.’
‘There’s such a thing as being too clever for your own good,’ warned Sadly.
‘So people keep on telling me. However, in this matter I think you will find your mission and my own perfectly aligned.’
‘Are you an Inquisition officer, Mister Daunt?’
‘Perish the thought,’ said Daunt. ‘The church wouldn’t have defrocked me so readily if I had been. They’re under the misapprehension that they employ my services every so often, and it only seems like fair play to draw upon their resources in turn. The commodore’s sister made the same mistake when she linked me up to their machine to sift through my memories.’
‘And now you’re asking the Court to repeat the error? You’re not very reassuring, says I.’
‘Oh, I’m sure the Court of the Air is far too devious for me to play you along.’
The everglades’ bush was thinning out, the orange dunes of a beach ahead and the crashing sea beyond. The danger of the place was underlined by hundreds of abandoned carapaces lying in the sand, outgrown by generations of maturing tiger crabs. And how many tiger crabs are scuttling about out there with their shells still on, I wonder?
‘And what’s your explanation for the camp commandant burning up when he died?’
‘Patience, good agent. What exactly do you have concealed inside your cane? Not a flag rolled up with the word “help” sown on, I trust?’
‘An isotope,’ said Sadly. ‘Its signature can be followed from half an ocean away.’
Daunt glanced at the bottom of the man’s cane. It was leaking the last of a foul-looking green liquid onto the sand.
‘You’ve flushed it into the swamp…?’
‘Water nullifies it.’
‘And the signal stopping is the sign for your extraction,’ said Daunt, satisfied with himself. ‘I trust your colleagues have stayed near.’
‘You never know when you’re going to outwear your welcome.’
Any self-satisfaction vanished with the whistling of bullets past Daunt’s left ear, close enough to shave his sideburn.
‘Camp guards,’ yelled Morris, sprinting for the reedy dunes in front of them and throwing himself over the ridge. Jethro, Boxiron, Sadly and Dick Tull were fast behind the wiry convict, spurts of sand chasing their passage as they hurled themselves towards the sparse cover of the beach. There was something about the footsteps they had left in the sand, but what? Daunt didn’t have time to ponder. A cloud of gull-like lizards exploded into the air as the party of escapees landed close to their nests in the dune grass, bullets flitting over their heads with the buzz of roused hornets. Dick Tull pushed a shell into the stolen rifle and fired back, the gill-necks keeping cover, hunkering down along the edge of the everglades in response to this solitary, lonely voice of opposition. Geysers of sand erupted as the guards concentrated their volleys on the muzzle flash of Dick’s rifle.
‘There’s too sodding many of them over there,’ said Dick.
‘We just need to hold them off for a few minutes more,’ called Sadly. ‘Look!’
Out at sea, a u-boat was surfacing, but not any design that Daunt was familiar with… a bulbous, almost organic-shaped hull with a rotating stern composed of large metal tentacles that gave the craft something of the appearance of a steel squid. With a conning tower set as low and angular as a shark’s fin, a hatch in her lee was opening to release a pair of low metal surface boats. Both boats angled out heading towards the shore. Sailors stood on the prows with capacitor packs cabled up to tridents, the men releasing bursts of wild energy at the tiger crabs surfacing around the submarine. Old Death-shell’s kin appeared incensed at this strange metal interloper intruding upon their realm. The creatures weren’t the only ones to spot the rescue craft. More guards emerged in front of the jungle, throwing themselves down and sighting on the dunes.
‘If we try for the sea, they’ll cut us down before we make five yards,’ said Boxiron.
‘You go old steamer,’ urged Daunt. ‘The gill-necks might have dialled down your strength near to mine, but they haven’t yet exchanged your hull for flesh. Wade out there and find Commodore Black, tell him to place King Jude’s sceptre under the protection of the Court of the Air.’
‘They must have recovered the commandant’s corpse, see,’ moaned Morris. ‘We’re dead men now, whatever we do.’
As if in agreement with the convict’s prediction, the drone of the fusillade over their heads was swapped for a strident cannon-like booming, explosions of sand in front of the dunes swelling, showering them with beach debris.
‘They have brought up the heavy guns used to do business with the tiger crabs. Pass me your machete,’ Boxiron ordered Morris, feeling its heft in his left hand as the convict did as he was bid, its weight balancing the other blade gripped tight in the steamman’s right fist.
‘Boxiron,’ Daunt pleaded, ‘do not do this.’
‘What else am I for, old friend?’ asked Boxiron. He rose to his full height from behind the dunes and charged, a lumbering zigzagging assault caused as much by a lack of motor control as any desire to dodge the guards’ bullets. Shots cracked around him as he pounded through the sand, the gill-necks adjusting their range to home in on him. A couple of guards were thrown back by Dick Tull using the distraction to increase his rate of fire, reloading from his satchel of charges like a demon. Out at sea, the boats were closing on the beach, seconds away from landing. The crewmen inside were kneeling now, riding in on the jouncing waves. The tiger crabs had temporally withdrawn out of range of the sailors’ capacitor packs, bobbing around the submersible and awaiting for their food to return. It wouldn’t take long for the camp guards to redirect their fire towards the rescue boats. And if the boats were struck by something that could discourage a tiger crab, they would be in trouble.
Dick Tull rose, firing the rifle from the hip. ‘Leg it for the water.’
Boxiron had reached the line of guards, a few gill-necks standing up just in time to face his machetes, twin windmills of death as he cut and slashed about him. He was staggering back from the blasts at short range. Not even the armour the criminal underworld had fitted their hulking ex-possession with was proof against this level of abuse.
‘Move!’ called Sadly, dragging Daunt back. ‘Right now, your noggin’s the most valuable thing on this island.’
Only to everyone at home. To Daunt, the most valuable thing on the island was the steamman about to throw his life away against the ranks of their gill-neck pursuers.
When Charlotte saw the two darkships, the only part of their description that covered what she had been expecting to see was their colour: a shining, oily darkness rippling along their featureless hulls. Nothing else about them resembled any submarine she had heard of. Pear-shaped and driving forward on the sharp of their noses, the crafts couldn’t have been more than forty feet long. Their approach was soundless. There was no sign of a means of propulsion, no portholes, no torpedo slits, no hydroplanes, no conning tower, no ventilation intakes, no rudders for steering. It didn’t take much to believe this evil pair had escaped from Elizica’s prophecy and the legends of the seanore. Demon chariots, the chasm’s seed, their skins sucked the light out of the ocean, surfaces made a rippling absence of matter, organic teardrops of devilry solidified into twin darts and sliding with pernicious intent towards the nomads’ grand congress.
Where the outskirts of the underwater forest gave way to the encampment, dozens of warriors rose from sentry positions in the wavering kelp, casting rotor-spears at the ebony teardrops accelerating towards the assembly. At least seven explosive-headed rods were heading straight for the bows of the two craft, white trails of bubbles fuming behind rotors built into their shafts, the darkships suddenly banking contemptuously into the swarm, detonating the spears. Both darkships powered forward, even faster now while the warriors below had drawn their shock spears, angling the discharge of electric bolts towards the belly of the two ships. The twin craft overshot the warriors. As they passed, the seanore underneath doubled up in agony, clutching their ears and left writhing above the wavering forest of kelp. Just being in the proximity of the darkships was enough to drive the nomads into waves of agony.
Elizica’s words resonated inside Charlotte’s mind. ‘Sound — the enemy is using sound as a shield. The seanore’s eardrums exploded when the darkships passed, ruptured like the triggers on the rotor-spears’ warheads, detonating before they hit the hull.’
